Neo-Godzillas vs. Giant Transformers; Both Lose

Rating: 2/10 (12 July 2013)

Pacific Rim (2:11, PG-13, Imax, 3-D) — 2 — SF, biggie, original, OSIT chauvinists
Clocking in at 2:11, the exact same running length as Iron Man 3 (and also with the same PG- 13 rating), Pacific Rim manages about 10% of the personality and intellectual content, traded off for about 400% of the death, destruction, general smashing, and noise.
It's a mash-up of the rubber-suited Godzillas (now rendered in 3-D by state-of-the-art computers to no greater degree of credibility) and the incredibly noisy, frenetic, jumble-cut train wrecks of the Transformers series. What appear to be people walk thru several of the scenes, generally shouting at or speaking severely to each other in intense tones — except for the wild-eyed, agitated jargon-slinging of the last 2 scientists on Earth that you'd want entrusted with the preservation of civilization (who, of course, are exactly that).
Much of the dialog is muddled and only semi-intelligible, except for some nice, crisp subtitles on the screen when the only female for 100 klicks in any direction, Mako Mori (played by the charming Rimko Kikuchi, the only person in the entire movie who ever smiles), gets off a few lines of ritual self-deprecation and submissiveness. Otherwise it's a testosterone-laden gonad flaunting to see who owns the fire hydrant.
Mori and ostensible hero Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam) are co-pilots of Gypsy Danger, the last remaining Mark 3 model jaeger (German for "fighter"), which is a truly gargantuan robotic fighting machine that's so complicated it requires 2 synced-up human brains (said to be "in the drift" when linked) to control it properly. The Mark 3 is recommissioned after all the newer models are rendered useless when the invading kaiju (Japanese for "giant beasts"), arriving thru a trans-dimensional rift on the Pacific floor, deploy electrical zappers to short out all the digital electronics. "But the Mark 3 is analog", exclaims Becket, as he volunteers to take it out to battle a pair of kaiju who emerged in only the last couple of hours to threaten Hong Kong (after earlier lone monster warriors had wreaked havoc on San Francisco, Manila, and either Cabo or Kabul — couldn't tell from the garbly soundtrack).
The human-seeming characters have tried in the past to nuke the rift in the ocean floor and so seal it off from further kaiju incursions, but they've had trouble getting past some obstacle whose name and nature are fleetingly alluded to and thereafter ignored. This time, tho, they have the advantage of some work-around that one of the scientists discovered when doing a jaeger-pilot-style mind-meld with what's left of the brain of an earlier kaiju.
The time it took you to read the above plot description is about as much as what the movie spent on it. Yet Travis Beacham will still collect a check for what is honorarily known as a "screenplay". Fully 80% of the film is just whirling, thudding, smashing, bashing fight scenes, which move so fast and in such close-up (also generally in darkness and lots of splashing water, since this is a surf movie of a sort) that you can't tell who's who or who's doing what to which.
I saw it in Imax (a good size screen for the spectacle that director Guillermo Del Toro is obviously trying to create), 3-D (originally shot as such for the CGI scenes but post-converted for the minority of the film that pretends to pay attention to people), and 20,000 watts of surround sound (which blessedly weren't quite as deafening as the literally painful Transformers 2). The talents of Ramin Djawadi, who wrote the haunting, evocative theme song to HBO's Game of Thrones, are here wasted on what I'm sure he was instructed to render as pompous bombast, which plays relentlessly under almost every scene.
There's a welcome cameo appearance by Ron Perlman as a larger-than-life underworld figure who's discovered that the market for powdered rhino horn or tiger penis pales in comparison to what flaccid Asian men are apparently willing to pay on the black market for reprocessed kaiju.
You know that Del Toro is going to max out the visuals, and he doesn't disappoint in that regard, which is one of the few things keeping this regrettable pile of brainless, pointless, overwrot violence from sinking all the way down that rift in the Pacific trenches to a rating of 1.